Transforming 1271 Pane by Pane

Transforming 1271 pane by pane

On February 7, 2017, workers began stripping the curtain wall off 1271 Sixth Avenue and replacing it, in one of the first ground-to-roof office tower recladdings ever attempted in the city. It was a novelty that came with myriad unknowns that had to be addressed.

“The logistics of the site were extraordinary,” says Turner Construction Company vice president and general manager Charlie Whitney, who led the effort as project manager, as he did recently for a 16-story classroom building at Barnard College and a 900-foot-long, 160,000-square-foot science lab erected over the FDR Drive for Rockefeller University. Whitney points out that a panel of glass falling from the upper reaches of a 50-story tower might sail as far as two blocks, posing a potentially lethal threat along Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan—route of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and tens of thousands of tourists and commuters every weekday. What he describes as the hardest part came early: the removal of the windows along the ground floor. These windows, supporting nearly 600 feet of others rising atop them, had stood firm for nearly 60 years.

“The system was built from the ground up and we removed it from the ground up, so the system no longer had anything to bear on if any of the connections [had] loosened over time,” explains Whitney.

Now, to make sure they all stayed put, members of Turner’s 241-person crew, drawn from 35 contractors, first had to tighten the steel bolts that locked the cladding in place. A threestory scaffold (custom fabricated at a shop in Glens Falls, New York) weighing just over 70 tons was erected around the tower and suspended on cables from the roof. In succeeding weeks, it was slowly winched upward, in 30 sections stretching a total of 800 linear feet around the building. The crew pulled out old windows from the top level of scaffolding, while the two lower levels captured debris and acted as a fail-safe, respectively. Next, six-person crews lowered each of the 6,600 new curtainwall panels from the roof using a crab crane and pivoted them into place from inside. Tests on a three-story sample of the new façade, set up at the manufacturer’s in Pennsylvania, included aircraft engines driving deluges of water at the new windows for hours on end—not so different from tests done in 1958.

The last deadline for project completion was December 2, 2019. In the end, Turner beat that deadline by two and a half months—on September 13. It did so despite the discovery of asbestos in a waterproofing coating long ago applied to the exterior, one that required careful, costly remediation. On the plus side, a new rule by Mayor Bloomberg’s administration allowed landlords to expand their buildings outward by 9 inches per side in return for making energy-saving improvements to their properties. At 1271, those efficiency upgrades included insulated windows, more efficient heating and cooling units, and LED lights in the landmarked lobby and elsewhere. All told, the swap created significant new square feet of space per story.

So finely tuned was the renovation that several retail tenants lived through 1271’s rebirth without losing a day of business. Among them were Bright Horizons, the childcare franchise, and two restaurants on the north side of the building, the Capital Grille and Ted’s Montana Grill— the latter named after cofounder and occasional patron Ted Turner (who also founded Time Inc. subsidiary CNN).

PIVOTING A UNIT into place between a new ornamental aluminum fin and an original limestone-clad pier (opposite).

TURNER CONSTRUCTION’S CHARLIE WHITNEY addresses assembled guests and crew (left); the extension’s recladding is nearly complete with its nine-foot-wide windows (right).

THE STEPPED FORM with fountains is made of Jet Mist granite, quarried in Virginia; it also frames the planters and sits at the base of the façade marking out the perimeter of the plaza’s urban room.

In early 2020, nearly three years after work at the Time & Life Building began and as a whole new set of tenants settled into the tower now known as 1271 Avenue of the Americas, Shawn O’Neill, director of security for Rockefeller Group, still could not get over what had happened. “It’s like a whole new building,” he says. “It’s the biggest change Ron and I have seen in all our years here.”

And that’s saying something. O’Neill and colleague Ron Perez, manager of engineering, both arrived nearly 35 years ago, and both remain. It’s the building that’s moved on, with their help.

On the engineering front, there is 400,000 square feet—48 stories' worth—of new doublepaned glass curtain wall, a new heating and ventilation system (with fans on each floor blowing a mix that includes outside air through superfine filters), low-flow plumbing fixtures, LED lights, destination elevators, and more. “It’s all LEED driven,” says Perez, referring to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design designation and the effort to earn the building a gold rating for sustainability.

In the new 1271, there are also fewer walls— especially of the nontransparent variety—more open-plan floors, and more people. When Time Inc. occupied the entire tower, it did so with an army that peaked at 4,000 people, housed in a then-novel open setting. In 2021, when the final new tenant settles in and occupancy approaches full, the building will officially boast a population as much as 100 percent higher than ever before— perhaps 8,000 individuals. To serve them, Perez notes, several companies are following Time’s lead by installing their own cafeterias, while others have carved out space for food pantries and dining and socializing areas. One unexpected consequence is that 1271’s long-standing lunchtime rush hour has faded. “More people stick around and eat,” notes Perez, rather than venturing to restaurants outside.

Meanwhile, the flow of celebrity visitors trooping in for interviews with various Time Inc. publications—a tide that peaked every midSeptember with the opening of a new General Assembly session at the UN—has ceased. For the UN’s 50th anniversary conclave 25 years ago, Fidel Castro was among those making the crosstown trek, motorcading straight down to 1271’s sub-basement loading docks. There, surrounded by a phalanx of his own heavily armed guards (having barred the U.S. Secret Service) and clutching a lit cigar, he was whisked upstairs by Rockefeller Center security staff. In contrast, when the Clinton Foundation leased space on floors 41 and 42 in the late 2010s, family and visitors alike entered through the lobby like everyone else. They did, however, rate their own elevator and designated operator.

Now Major League Baseball, Latham & Watkins, and Bessemer Trust have their own check-in desks in the lobby. In total, 9 world-renowned names now welcome guests to the corner of 50th Street and Sixth Avenue that had long been home to just one.

WALKING THROUGH THE breezeway from 51st Street to the plaza at twilight, 1271’s wide expanse of signature paving appears to stretch across the avenue, stopping only at the foot of Radio City Music Hall (above).

A TOWER IN FULL: the quintessential hero shot of the redeveloped 1271 (right).